Winona Ryder: I don't touch the Web

But this epithet is clearly inaccurate. For its rightful name is the World Wide Winonaless Web.

Winona Ryder, one of the more underrated actors in Hollywood's pit of ceaseless machination, wants the world to know that she is Web-free. She will not, you see, be persuaded to commit herself to surfing the world's information systems in order to satiate some silly need to discover information.

In an Elle interview published last week, Ryder, who was entirely stellar in such movies as "Edward Scissorhands," "Girl, Interrupted," and one of the more prescient movies of our time, "S1m0ne," said she has never used the Web.

You think I am bathing in a bubble bath of hyperbole? Well, please let me quote the interview.

"I don't use the Internet," said Ryder. "But apparently you can find out everything on it." Well, only if you wade through all of the Wikileaks cables.

CC Shaikh Irfan/Flickr

Ryder, who is the goddaughter of famed rationalist Timothy Leary, admitted that she does own a BlackBerry. She also confessed that director Ron Howard gave her an iPad as a gift at the end of a recent shoot.

However, she proudly insists that she has not used it. She has never, ever, indeed, even read a blog.

Her rationale for this was fascinating: "I feel like it's taking away that great anticipation of seeing a movie. It used to be you'd hear, like, Al Pacino was making a movie, and you wouldn't know anything about it. And nowadays, you know it all, like how much [the actors] are being paid. I would hate to see a picture of me and the caption reads, 'Is she worth it?'"

I know there will be some who will make like lords-a-leaping, in their enthusiasm to explain to Ryder that there is more on the World Wide Web than information about Hollywood--though sometimes it seems that this isn't the case.

However, I find myself fixated on how her Web resistance might make her life easier. While some might scoff at the idea that she still writes letters using something called a pen, she doesn't, for example, have to worry this morning about resetting the thousand passwords that are strewn all over the online landscape.

Moreover, when she travels, she doesn't need to lug a laptop in her hand luggage. She doesn't need to worry about batteries running out or the strength of Wi-Fi connections. And she won't be like the lady who walked into my favorite Cuban restaurant today and demanded a table "next to a plug."

Freedom, as the nice people of Anonymous are at pains to point out, is a very precious thing.